Time & Perspective Quote by Robert A. Dahl

Comfort is amnesiac: it turns yesterday's breakthrough into today's background noise. Robert A. Dahl, a political scientist who spent his career interrogating power and democracy, is doing more than offering a genteel reminder to be grateful. He's describing a structural feature of modern life - and a political hazard. When "things" become taken for granted, they stop being defended, debated, or even seen. Rights, institutions, technologies, and norms shift from contested achievements into assumed fixtures, which is exactly when they become easiest to erode.

The line works because it compresses a whole theory of progress into one quiet reversal. Discovery isn't just about inventors and explorers; it's about societies learning, through conflict and experimentation, what can be built and what must be protected. Dahl's subtext is skeptical of complacent narratives: the present feels natural only because the messy work that produced it has been edited out of memory. "Readily" is the tell - the speed of our forgetting is the problem.

In context, Dahl wrote in an era shaped by world wars, the expansion of suffrage and civil rights, the Cold War's ideological battle over "democracy", and later the creeping normalization of inequality and institutional distrust. For a scholar of pluralism, the warning lands squarely on citizens, not just leaders: democratic life depends on recalling that what looks inevitable was once improbable. Take it for granted, and you outsource stewardship to whoever is most willing to seize it.